Amazon Has Developed a New e-Book Format called KFX

A few months ago Amazon rolled out the Bookerly font to its line of iOS apps and the Kindle Paperwhite 3. This new font was exclusively developed for e-reading in mind. In order to really take advantage of the new format, Amazon had to develop a new e-book format. In the past they used AZW and MOBI for the standard book, but they new one is called KFX.

Amazon claims there are around 100,000 e-books on their website that their titles in the new KFX format. If you want to find out if a specific title will give you the optimal reading experience you look on the book’s description page at Amazon. There’s a new label that shows if enhanced typesetting has been enabled.

Here is the real kicker, many of the e-books you already have on your Kindle might show KFX on the product description page, but still is not providing you with the most robust experience. What you need to do, is delete the e-book on your Kindle and download it again. Your purchases are safely stored in the cloud, so you won’t lose access to them. Instead, you will simply download the book once again, but in the new Amazon KFX format.

What is a story about a new Kindle e-book format, if Good e-Reader did not provide a scoop. Here is the deal. Amazon has developed a tool that they are using in-house called kfxgen that they use to convert the old e-book format to the new one. Currently publishers don’t have a way to submit newer titles in KFX and the official Kindle Previewer tool does not support enhanced typesetting. Kindle for PC also does not include the new font, so if you decide you want to strip the DRM from your books, you will be unable to do so with KFX. Calibre, a preferred e-book management tool also does not have support for KFX either.

OK, so what exactly is KFX and Bookerly? Many of you might be wondering. Basically, it is a new font and rendering engine that is supposed to give you a better reading experience. Many Kindle books in the past had weird spaces between words and when authors used hyphens. Sometimes it felt a little bit discombobulated when you were into a book and text “started to look like this” If you want to learn more about Bookerly, in a very scientific way, check out the advanced description HERE.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times.

So what happens when I download an enhanced book on the Kindle Android app? It won’t download at all? Any updates on when Bookerly will be available on Kindle for Android?

Martha Smith

And what happens when I download an enhanced book with Kindle for PC? Will it download in kfx format, or mobi format? If I can’t use Calibre to manage my ebooks, I don’t think I’ll buy from Amazon nearly as often.

Michael, if you know – if I upload an EPUB that I generated in iBooks Author (Apple recently put in some new templates for EPUB only), would Amazon also convert this file to the new KFX rather than the mobi? You say it works on iOS so I wonder if now my Mac app will also convert better on Amazon. In the past, the conversion resulted in the TOC not showing up (functioning) but on the iPad it does. Again, if you know anything about this. Thanks

marcwilson

If you go to Amazon in a browser, you can select books and download them to a PC (or Mac, I assume) and save them as AZW, which you can then import into Calibre as normal.